news.ycombinator.com Archives - 11 April 2013, Thursday

I'm not sure what you mean by 'forking the entire codebase'.Even if Rails3, though, Rails supported multi-threaded request dispatching IF you had an app server stack that supported it. In Rails3, you just had to explicitly turn it on with `config.threadsafe!`. Rails4 makes that the de...

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I don't know how anyone can call it a Bitcoin competitor.Instead of a proof of work decentralized consensus ripple depends on a consensus of _trusted servers_. In Bitcoin language ripple is distributed but not decentralized. Then multiply that out by the fact that its native currency ...

It is not supposed to be anything. If you understand why it's useful more in the future than it is today, you can treat it as an investment. If you see how it helps sending EUR to USD without paying 30 EUR conversion fees, you can use it as a payment channel (bitcoin-central.net - BTC...

How do you guys who are freelancers or perhaps you work for a company and are the only guy working on a particular app handle security stuff like this?A lot of what I hear is "drop what you are doing and patch this right now!". But of course there are many reasons why this might not b...

The problem with all fiat currencies is they have no inherent value; it is all in the eye of the beholder. So what is an "appropriate" price is quite difficult to determine. Most currencies are driven by being effective monopolies wherever they are issued, so the market price remains ...

"What generally prevents tons of fracturing is the same thing that always has- perceived value of the currency."Except that "perceived value" is not what prevents fiat currencies from fracturing. A government could, at any time, issue a new currency that competes with or replaces its ...

It seems strange to even sell these units at all right now. If they really can pay for their (retail!) value within a week, the real money is in running them, continuously, until the difficulty gets so high that they can only pay for themselves within, say, 6mo or more.It may be that ...

Hello HN community, I'm just curious about the rise of this new BitCoin currency. I'm currently developing an Saas product myself, so I'm actually torn between choosing various currency processors/vendors.Can someone explain as to 1) Why and when one should use BitCoin? 2) What advant...

The $210/day for $1,300 only holds for a single incremental device. Since the network produces a mostly fixed number of bitcoins per day regardless of the hashing power thrown at it, there are severe diminishing returns for running a lot of these devices. I think the current math is t...

Many of the analogies used to explain Bitcoin are, unfortunately, misleading. Saying 'each bitcoin', for example, as if it were a tangible collectable, introduces a bunch of associations that aren't helpful for understanding.Instead, think of Bitcoin as a giant consensus accounting le...

This is by Mencius Moldbug, a coder who made off with enough options money just prior to the dot-com crash to basically be retired in the Bay Area, reading and writing. He's been bringing the wordy essays for almost a decade now on a wide variety of topics, but I'll save you some time...

Ruby Toolbox is a great source. I think opensourcerails.com has an equal and opposite value. Often times it is difficult to visualize how all of the tools fit together, before you start. Having a site where you can look through an open source fully functional site and figure out which...

That is an absolutely terrible lesson to draw from this episode.First and most importantly, Airbnb and Uber are not disrupting industries burdened primarily by consumer safety regulations; they are disrupting industries burdened primarily by barriers to entrance that are designed to d...

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(Bah, great point about passwords. I need to reform my ways.)To amplify and expand on Thomas here: when this was announced I pushed the Big Red Button and pushed three emergency patches to my servers at 3 to 5 AM Japan time. My perception was "This just can't wait." I went to sleep wi...

I guess them adding that to their FAQ is an attempt to try and prove that they're not an assassination market:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market An assassination market or market for assassinations is a prediction market where any party can place a bet (using anonymous ...

You are going to have problems with this whenever you are composing SQL statement with any type of user-provided data as part of the raw SQL string passed to the server.This generally happens in one of two says: 1) (most common) You have a SQL statement that takes a user-provided para...

I posted this on /r/bitcoin, but this might be relevant here.It seems Bitcoin is moving from the innovator phase of the technology adoption lifecycle to the early adopter one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle The community and services around it is maturing. ...

I hope there are better arguments for the deflationary nature of Bitcoin than this article.The author uses the utterly senseless definition of deflation as a change in the total money supply, instead of per capita money supply. If Bitcoin becomes more popular, its asset value increase...

Hm, I am Not Happy about a feature of the new protocol. It's unfortunate that -- although I can hear the gears of politics turning in the document -- the details of the argument that spawned it are not laid out there for me to read.In this day and age, using X.509 for something like t...

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Seems like Bitcoin is being rapidly adopted as a viable currency choice. For a while there I wasn't convinced Bitcoin was going to survive the issues it faced, especially all of the controversy surrounding fraudulent Bitcoin exchanges and wallet services that disappear with users Bitc...

I'm strongly surprised that is not widely used for money laundering yet.It seems perfect for the purpose of storing value and moving it semi-anonymously. Especially since you can just buy a bunch of very generic hardware with stolen money and mine pure money. I'm hoping underground wi...

As I stated in an earlier comment, I would likely have a different experience with Django now. Django was the first framework I attempted to learn, so I'll wholeheartedly admit that some of that was inexperience with web applications (started programming with non-web VB and Java).I co...

I disagree. inflation is _a_ motivator for exchanging currency for other assets/services. But i don't think it is a primary motivator. Inflation/deflation is only a strong motivator in abnormal circumstances. With 2-3% inflation my primary motivation for buying things is way more abou...

Bitcoin works by having "blocks" of data, containing transaction history (every Bitcoin transfer someone has made - it is only actually made when incorporated into a block), "mined" by a network. These blocks are mined by incrementing a value in the block of data computing a hash of i...